


For Love and Wanda Maximoff

by StellarRequiem



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: 9 zillion comics references because I can, Comic-canon reality-manipulating Wanda cause hell yeah, F/M, Goes all the way up to infinity wars, I know weird Gatsby-ness just bear with me, Implied Nat/Bucky, It's so cheesy dramatic retro Scarlet Vision though I swear it's still a happy fic, Pretty much everyone gets mentioned but this is really a fic about Wanda, Probably not CA Civil War canon-consistent, Slow Burn, Steve dies in the Civil War bit heads up, not exactly anyway, overly dramatic kissing, through nat's POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 14:50:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5295446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A one-shot epic in allllmooost 20,000 words spanning from the end of AoU all the way to (my interpretation of) Infinity War, all of which is focused entirely on the developing relationship between Wanda and her teammates--most notably, between Wanda and Vision.</p><p>By which I mean it's about 20k worth of slow-burn Scarlet Vision and I'm just bad at summaries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Love and Wanda Maximoff

 

I

 

Wanda had never been “girlish,” I-brainwashed-an-employee-of-Urban-Outfitters-for-these-gloves getup notwithstanding. The first semblance of a “soft” side that Natasha had heard attributed to her was pulling Ultron-Prime’s electric heart out, and that’s more or less the approach to people that she’s maintained in the weeks since. She’d made it clear from day one that she openly mistrusted every member of their team who had the remotest affiliation with the United States military, with the possible exception of Cap—too much an anachronism to be complicit in more modern crimes and grudges—and Stark, who she seems to have rightfully assumed to be more or less the closest thing to an actual mad scientist that reality will allow, too inconsistent and secretly self-depreciating to need reminding of his guilt. She’s also since taken to Clint in the sense that she doesn’t seem to hate him, though he hasn’t been around enough for it to matter now that the “farm” is no longer a secret and he can—and does—disappear to it at will.

Natasha, though, Wanda hasn’t bothered to do anything with, whether to accept or hate. She seems to be in a class of her own. Everything Wanda says to her is without artifice. She greets her for training with a _dobroe utrpra_ , and occasionally mutters idioms and insults in Russian or her near-to-it native language, though she knows Natasha is the only one that understands. But for all their linguistic in-jokes, the girl’s mind is as closed to Natasha as Natasha’s is open to her. Not that she’d expected an apology from Wanda Maximoff for the whole mind-invasion stunt—in Natasha’s mind, there’s no practical point to one—but she had expected more than this empty pseudo-friendliness . . . she’d expected too much. She kicks herself when it finally occurs to her why she’s as frustrated as she is: Wanda mistrusts her, not as an enemy, nor as a traitor to the motherland or its various broken parts, but as an unknown element. With no allegiance to east or west or human or mutant, Wanda seems to have instead declared Natasha a wildcard safest when kept at arm’s reach. Which is, to be fair, a safe assessment.

But Wanda turns the same wary but weightless, casual attitude on SHIELD, too, and it goes about as well as Natasha could have expected. Especially with Fury. It turns what should be basics, what should be logistics, into small, diplomatically worded battles between the man with the eye patch and the girl codenamed Scarlet Witch that no amount of coaxing by any of her new teammates has yet been able to explain.

It’s a surprise, then—even to Natasha—when she finds Wanda, following one such verbal battle, in an enclave off the hallway explaining her frustration to an android with perfect, unaffected candidness. The Vision—who has yet to pick a more palatable name for himself, and whom Clint and Natasha have therefore taken to calling _Vizh_ —notices her first.

“Miss Romanoff,” he greets her. She shakes her head, reminding herself as a curl of hair falls into her eye that she needs to cut it again.

“ _Nat_ ,” she corrects him. “ _Miss Romanoff_ makes you sound like JARVIS.”

“I imagine that _is_ disconcerting,” he replies.

That Stark had picked the voice for JARVIS that he had way back when, so that Vision could have it now, is a blessing. It renders his bloated syntax less machinelike, for all the good that does his appearance. Looking at him, Natasha asks herself on a regular basis whether he’d been entirely _finished_ when she’d taken him from Ultron. Natasha doesn’t gamble, but if she did she’d place her bets on his having been intended to be _completely_ red—as he is, he looks like he’d been waiting for one more coat of synthetic skin over the patchwork of greenish metal that crisscrosses him from head to toe.

_Oops._

Wanda turns on Natasha in the time it takes her to muse on Vision’s appearance. Her cool-but-sharp-eyed look dares Natasha to eavesdrop some more. She presses her mouth into a thin line after a moment, adding to the challenge, so Natasha crosses her arms but relaxes her stance.

“Is everything ok?” she asks, “Sorry about Fury back there, he can get like that. He’s not all bad, though. You learn how to deal with him.”

Wanda’s reply comes complete with a second’s worth of red in her eyes.

“I am _fine_.”

Vision looks at her with a furrowed brow, staring down at the top of her head while she continues her attempt to level Natasha with only her eyes, though the promise of telekinesis or . . . whatever she does, exactly, doesn’t look far behind. Natasha’s hand twitches against the fold of her elbow, a reflex to reach for tools and weapons that probably wouldn’t help her anyway. But she does unfold her arms, at least, freeing herself to move in whatever direction necessary at the fastest speed she can manage. Wanda blinks. Vision continues staring.

Wanda breaks eye contact for all of a second, irises flicking towards the shoulder he’s standing over. He looks at Natasha, opens his mouth, closes it, and looks back to Wanda. Vision says Wanda’s name like a question. She looks away for three full seconds, long enough to take a sucker-punch to the jaw. But Natasha keeps her arms crossed. When Wanda locks eyes with her again, she sighs.

“Sorry,” she says. No explanation, none needed. That much, Natasha understands.

“It’s all right,” she replies, “I get it. If you do ever want any help with him, though, just let me know.”

Natasha turns to go, already two steps down the hall when a “thanks” comes from behind her. She turns to wave, to smile at least a little, but Wanda is already back to staring in the general direction of Vision’s feet, her hands clenched at her sides, weighing down drooping shoulders. Neither of them speaks. But Wanda sighs. When she lifts her head again, standing close enough to Vision’s green-clad chest that she has to turn her face almost to the ceiling to look him in the eye, Natasha hears her whisper “Do you see what I mean?” in a desperate tone that matches her knitting brows. Natasha waits to raise hers until long after she’s out of sight.

The next day, Wanda finds her in the cafeteria.

“Hey,” she says. She’s holding a little paper bag in one hand, a to-go, pre-packaged plastic bottle of milk in the other. She likes Steve’s bike as much as Natasha does, and so Stark had offered her one of his early on. She uses it most days to go get her lunch—and spend the better half of her free time—somewhere outside the complex.

“Hey,” Natasha replies, setting down her tea, “what’s up?”

Wanda takes an infinitesimally too-long breath and holds out the paper bag. It smells like . . . delicious.

“You’d been to Sokovia . . .  before, right?”

“A couple of times.” Some trips for uglier reasons than others.

“Did you ever have the pirozhki?”

Natasha laughs.

“I was Russian once,” she says, “I’ve had _plenty_ of pirozhki”

“Not like ours,” Wanda retorts. “They may have come to us from Russia, but we’re perfecting them in Sokovia. May I sit?”

“Go for it.”

Wanda plops down across from her and digs into her paper bag of delicious. The look of what she withdraws is familiar, if the smell is extraordinary: round, bun-like lumps of bread vented across the top and filled with cabbage and meats and potatoes and whatever stroke of genius Sokovia, evidently, added somewhere along the way.  The best translation for the food’s name is “pie,” since their larger cousins aren’t totally dissimilar to a savory version of the American dessert by that name, but she’d had better luck explaining them to Rogers by (generously) comparing them to runzas.

“Ok,” Natasha declares, “now I’m excited.”

Wanda, as a general rule, doesn’t laugh often, but she smiles so as to achieve the same effect as she passes Natasha a pastry. She pops the top off her milk, watching, waiting, and _does_ laugh at the sound Natasha makes as she eats.

“Easy Avenger,” she says, “they are not _that_ good.”

“They seem pretty moan-worthy to me. Where did you find that makes these?”

“There is a family owned bakery a few towns over. Vi—I was feeling—I looked it up, out of curiosity.”

Natasha swallows the bite of pirozhki she’s been working on. Wanda worries hers with the edge of a cafeteria fork rather than picking it up. Natasha watches her. She remains focused on her food. When her mouth is full, Natasha picks her own meal up again, and speaks over the top of it.

“I never knew how to be homesick,” she says. “They taught us loyalty where I . . . was trained, not affection. But I remember, on my first mission . . . I remember walking by this apartment building. One of those huge, uneven brick ones with the bulky metal doors and the balconies that looked ready to fall off even before people put things out on them. It had this mural on it. Yuri Gagarin, or something—I don’t even remember that part now—that was going to absolute ruin even though it must have been beautiful once. And I had this . . . it was more like Déjà vu, like I’d been there before, like maybe I’d always been there . . . Like that _one apartment building_ was everywhere I’d ever be.”

Wanda drops her fork, and nods.

“That’s it, mostly,” she says. “How it feels.”

“You could go back if you wanted. Cap and Fury are enjoying the boot camp approach, but they can’t actually _make_ you stay here all the time.”

Wanda shakes her head, looking towards the ceiling. The shadows falling from her broad cheekbones give her the momentary visage of a skull.

“It is not that,” she says to the ceiling before looking at Natasha again, “I could not go back . . . not now. Not . . . after.”

Natasha watches her as she descends on her food once more. She bites her lip, her own food going cold in her hand, while Wanda rounds on the milk bottle again.

_Come on, Tasha. Someone has to say something. Might as well be you._

Her voice low to begin with, she speaks in Russian to throw off eavesdroppers, also avoiding too-raw Sokovian.

“You miss him.”

Wanda pauses, milk halfway off the table, her gloved hand trapped in midair, having lost its way to her face. She looks Natasha dead in the eye without a hint of red in hers.

In English, she says:  “Of course I do.”

It’s not until they’re on their way out of the cafeteria that a tear rolls down her cheek, followed without hesitation by another, and another. Wanda reaches up as if to stop them and, finding the torrent unstoppable, hurries down the hall, out the door, and onto the lawn. There she pauses, permitting Natasha to catch up to her and put her hand on her shoulder while she rolls forward, face in her palms, until her elbows dig into her abdomen just above her pelvis. Natasha pats her back. Wanda sobs, for seemingly endless minutes, like what she is: young, and grieving, and even a little soft.

And so Natasha ignores four separate, vibrating-phone summons from someone—probably Rogers—unable to leave her, if not entirely sure what to _do_ for her. _Come on out here and I’m pretty sure you’ll forgive me,_ she thinks in the direction of her back pocket. Given that Natasha isn’t the resident telepath, however, her phone’s sole reply to this plea is vibrating once again. _Whatever, Rogers. I’ll get there when I get there._ It must be Cap—Fury would have charged outside himself by now, or sent Hill to do the same. When face to face summons do arrive, they come in the form of surprising blue eyes in an unfinished red face.

Vision drifts out the front door to the lawn with an announcement of Natasha’s being needed elsewhere, stopping himself mid-sentence as Wanda straightens, rubbing her eyes between now dryer, still-rattling sob-breaths.

“You’re crying,” he states, stepping towards her.

“People do that sometimes,” she hiccups. He opens a hand slowly, deliberately, over the shoulder Natasha has just dropped, his forearm posed to fall across Wanda’s back and balance on her somewhat protruding scapulae. He touches her with particular delicacy, but without hesitation. Natasha looks back and forth between the two of them, and bites into her lip for a few moments before releasing words along with it.

“I better go see what this is,” she says. Wanda nods, waving her away.

“If she still requires a shoulder,” Vision assures her, “she is welcome to mine.”

Natasha nods. Wanda turns and throws her arms around his waist.

Vision’s version of startling is to straighten up by a fraction of an inch, a furrow taking shape above his brow as if to underline the importance of the swirling yellow gem there, but start he does as Wanda lunges for him. The android is nothing if not adaptive, however. In the next second his arm comes to rest at last, without hesitation, across her shoulders while the other wraps around her back. He encompasses her smaller frame so completely that his left palm settles all the way on the opposite side of _her_ ribcage, and he peers down at the top of Wanda’s head with some inexplicable expression—impassive, gentle—that Natasha leaves to Wanda’s mind-invading to unravel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

II

 

“Are you coming, Tashka?”

“Not today,” Natasha replies, doing her level best to look like she’s up to something as she adds, “It’s pop quiz day. I just get to stand back and observe while Rogers throws things at you until we can determine whether all that drilling paid off.”

“You are cheated out of the throwing yourself, are you?”

“I’m sure I’ll get a few hits in . . . besides, I get to play judge and jury. But hey,” Natasha reaches out, waving Wanda closer to her with a gesture of wiggled fingers. Leaning into her pile of dark hair, she stage-whispers, “go show the boy’s club out there who’s top dog.”

Wanda’s reply includes the Sokovian word for _bitch,_ and leaves Natasha in stitches. Beside her, Rogers shakes his head.

“I don’t know what she just said,” he declares as they head up the stairs to the raised observation platform, the recruits gathering below, “and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.”

“Yeah, you might have to warn her about _language_ if you did.”

Rogers groans, throwing his head back so he looks every inch a particularly dramatic Norman Rockwell painting.

“It happened _one time_. One time! Am I the only one who remembers where we were ten hours before that?”

“At a children’s benefit. I _remember;_ it’s just funny anyway.”

He grumbles something that’s sounds like “you” and “Stark” and “humor” while he boots up the sea of monitoring equipment lined up along the platform rail. The room has more eyes than he and Natasha do, designed to capture progress and mishaps the veteran Avengers might otherwise miss. _Hopefully more success than mishap._

The recruits—now late in their second month at the facility—have been refining their individual skill-sets more or less alone. “Quiz day,” therefore, is meant not only to assess their sense of teamwork, but the strength of their individual contributions. To that end, the massive open space they call a gym is full from wall to wall with a cluttered ocean of interactive obstacles and pre-programmed challenges designed by Rogers, SHIELD, and Stark. None of it packs enough punch to do any real damage, but it’s been designed to leave bruises on bodies and dignity alike if they don’t stay on their toes.

The “quiz” itself follows a lose interpretation of a capture the flag structure, with their goal being to not only capture an innocuous black box at one end of the room, but to then run it back to the other while it begins a bomb-style countdown. The course between either box’s “bunker” is constructed to provide both plausible enemies and specialized attacks, including projectile globs of quicksand-like material designed specially to make flying a pain and walking a danger. Nevertheless, when the starting whistle blows,  Rhodey and Sam—both of whom are most effective while airborne and have difficulty accessing the box’s bunker entrance from above—make a point of drawing off the guns, pin wheeling and screaming through the air as they fly at each other along near miss trajectories that confuse the course’s offenses. The effort serves as a cover for Wanda, who takes point in the maze below.

“That’s surprising,” Rodgers mutters.

“Thought she was more a defense player, huh?”

“Not exactly . . . but I thought she’d be less direct.”

Natasha shrugs. “She has a good shield.”

Vision hovers behind and above her, dispelling the falling victims of Sam and Rhodes’ air war and some of the course’s faster pop-up, holographic opposition. His still-mysterious abilities take less wind-up than hers, though Wanda, at least at her most dangerous, hits harder.

“She is being pretty heavy handed with the course, too,” Natasha adds. Wanda sweeps away holographic enemies in broad swatches, hurling spheres and streaks of red energy at them with unabashed blunt force. The red in her eyes is visible from the platform with or without the use equipment to zoom in with—Rogers notices it, and shakes his head until their view is blurred by a blast from Vision’s forehead that evaporates a light, plastic projectile just before it can fall on Wanda’s head. She looks up at him, and nods, before turning her attention to the maze at large.

Rogers squints.

“What is it?”

“Have you seen them communicate?”

“Not with words. Why?”

“Because she hasn’t gotten lost yet.”

It’s true—Wanda is making her way at her own steady pace down the most direct possible route despite the fact that none of her airborne companions have shouted any direction down to her. And they _would_ have to shout: their comms are off-limits for the duration of the test; Natasha’s idea. _I said I’d get a few hits in._ Most of the shouting that is happening, however, is between Sam and Rhodes. When Wanda does call out, neither seem to hear her. And Vision, regardless of where he is on the field, seems intent on refusing to open his mouth at all.

“It won’t matter if she gets lost or not if they don’t start paying attention,” Natasha says.

The course is on a timer, the difficulty level rising. Up above, Rhodes, overconfident, draws too much attention to himself by buzzing one of the towers lobbing the plastic projectiles only to be yanked out of the air by the brute force of impact. Sam is more cautious, laughing at Rhodes as he flails.

“Rhodes,” he shouts, “are you going to come back up here, or do I have to dodge these all day?”

He’s smiling. Rhodes probably is, too, though they can’t see his face to be sure. Wanda also looks to be enjoying herself, beaming despite the sudden appearance of simulation guards in her path. She grins all the wider, looking a touch maniacal, as she adjusts her tactics. As she adopts stealth. Sneaks up behind them. The projections don’t have minds to wipe, but the simulation recognizes her gestures and leaves most of them apparently befuddled after an encounter with her. It takes her two minutes to reduce them all to aimless, head clutching stumbling. _Is that was she made us look like?_

“I’m glad that’s on our side,” Rogers notes, echoing Natasha’s thoughts.

“I’ll second that.”

For the next few moments, Wanda’s actions become the least-watched on the course, the airborne units regaining the attention of both sets of eyes on the observation platform.

Rhodes, recovering himself by blasting the glob of adhesive plastic that’s choking his right foot with one of the repulsors in his hands, comes to Sam’s assistance. The two of them speak in a flurry of shared military language, their reactions fast, their coordination smooth. Vision’s silence, meanwhile, leaves him victim to an ambush with no alternative but to emit his first and only word thus far, “Rhodes,” as he draws a swarm of attackers into the air in a long stream behind him. Rhodes picks them off like the lines of ships on a low level of Galaga with the gun on his shoulder. Vision nods in his direction before diving down betwixt the pillars and towers of the course again. Sam follows suit, driving down between the obstacles, whipping between them as one pursuer after another crashes to nothing against the course’s infrastructure. Amid the sounds of breaking plastic, Rhodes’ gun and Sam’s shouting, Wanda, without fanfare, makes her way into the box’s bunker. Rogers checks the time.

“Not bad,” he says, “What do you think they’d do if we split them up next time?”

“What, like teams of two? Vision and Sam, Rhodes and Wanda?”

“Anything other than Sam and Rhodes, Vision and Wanda. They’ve got that part figured out already.”

“That they do . . .” Sort of.

Down in the bunker—now visible only on video feed—Wanda, completely on her own, is getting overwhelmed. She’s backed into a corner, throwing attacks in wider and wider radiuses with less and less training-appropriate levels of power to fend off guards and globules alike. Natasha frowns.

“What were the ground rules about preserving the infrastructure?”

Rogers grunts. “Too vague, in hind sight.”

The course is taking a beating outside of the bunker as well: Vision takes on a new flock of pursuers with a similar approach to Wanda’s, blasting away at a sea of holographic enemies and projectiles in one long burst of thought and yellow light Natasha has to look away from for the sake of her own eyesight. The blast shakes one of the pillars of the course to its core at the precise moment that Sam also takes a noticeable hit, dodging an adaptive pursuer by leading both himself and it into a collision course with the same support pillar. The beam shakes as he peels away on one slightly bent wing. The thing it’s holding—a metal cylinder acting as the barrel down which most of the projectile elements of the course emerge—rocks across the top of it, shaking from the impact. A screech of metal suggestive of something having been knocked free that shouldn’t have rings through the space.

Natasha can hear the hardening in Roger’s expression without having to look at him.

“That’s not good.”

The cylinder is no small thing, and it thunders to Earth with the sound of _weight_ and cracking floor tiles, the groan of metal, and the dull thud of it impacting an android body still hovering in its path. Vision looks to be preparing to stabilize the pillar when the cylinder tumbles downward, dragging him with it. Beside Natasha, Rogers makes a “whoa” sound, and reaches for the simulation controls.

“ _Hold_!” he shouts. But a voice from the video feed overrides him. Wanda, inside the bunker, limping towards the box on a sore looking ankle, shouts “no.”

“Keep going,” she adds, “he is fine.”

“I don’t doubt it with vibranium for cell tissue, or . . . whatever,” Sam replies, voice crackling into existence, the hold having brought a suspension of the no-comms-rule. “Doesn’t mean that didn’t hurt.”

“Just wait,” Wanda replies. Her comm goes silent again. Rogers is shaking his head, a finger still inching towards the control panel. He pauses, though, a millimeter from halting the simulation entirely, waiting, tempted by her words. His eyes narrowed, he looks not at the screen where Wanda is actively retrieving the box, but the spot on the floor where Vision by all rights should be pinned. Natasha has to tap him on the shoulder to call his attention back to the latest and strangest behavior on the field: Wanda, instead of heading back to the door of the bunker, climbs. She wriggles her way between disjointed wall panels and disappears from the video.

A rush of red at the top of the base is the next they see of her. She edges through a gap in the construction, and swings her way out onto the roof.

“The athletic training was a good call,” Natasha offers.

“So was giving her more your technique than mine.”

“She’s close to my size.”

A moment passes, Wanda standing stock-still on the roof wearing a parted lip look that’s not quite a smile, yet difficult to name anything but, playing across her mouth.

“Timer’s running, recruit,” Rogers bellows at her over the still-increasing din. But Wanda doesn’t move. A swarm of airborne opposition turns in her direction, Sam and Rhodes forced to chase it down, drawing it up and away, without a word from her as to why. Wanda’s path to the opposite end of the room where the other bunker sits is, in fairness, teeming with new enemies, but her stillness is striking nevertheless.

“What the hell is she doing?” Rogers mutters.

“Knowing something we don’t?”

If Rodgers means to scoff at that comment, the moment to do so is soon lost. Something flashes on the video of the base interior. It flicks across all three levels, culminating in a green-gold glow at Wanda’s feet. She turns with a lifted brow to watch as the green—the color ambient, throbbing like overheated metal—solidifies around the emerging form of Vision. Natasha glances at Rogers.

“Has he always been able to do that?”

He shrugs, a gesture limited by crossed arms.

“I saw him put his hand throughan Ultron bot once.”

“I’m not sure that’s the same thing.”

“Me neither.”

Below them, Wanda is beaming at the floating new arrival to her rooftop.  Without her comm it’s hard to make out the words, but Natasha’s limited lip reading vocabulary suggests something along the lines of “things took you long enough.”

Vision shrugs, his retort lost to Natasha, though it makes Wanda smile again.

She hands him the box, and turns to face the room and the enemies now multiplying at an obscene rate, the original idea being that the team would be forced to radically change their strategy just when they’d thought they’d won. The gym is cluttered enough now that even flying the box to its new home is dodgy. Wanda looks at the chaos and smiles.

“Get clear!” she shouts.

She has a go-to way of arranging her hands to make sense of the energies she throws around, but rather than holding them there, she brings them together fingertip to fingertip and palm to palm out in front of her—the way children mime a shark’s mouth—and shoves them out in front of her. Red energy bubbles forth from her fingertips, blasts towards the center of the room, and explodes into a large sphere that, expanding like a supernova, levels obstacles and enemies alike as it goes.

Rogers swears.

Following the dissipating sphere, Vision leaps off the roof, box in hand, and barrels through the empty space where the pillars and beams of the course stood a moment before. He comes to an effortless and eerie halt too instantaneous for the speed he reaches just inches away from the doorway to the second bunker. He drops the box inside with its countdown timer still indicating sixty seconds left to go.

Natasha laughs. But Rogers squints. Upon collecting the team for a debrief, he addresses Vision first.

"Communication,” he barks, “first of all. With someone other than Wanda . . . which is all I saw out there. Or what I assume I saw out there; unless it’s just that everyone here but me already knew you could float through floors."

"I sincerely doubt it,” Vision replies. His tone is glossy, even, and as robotic as inheriting JARVIS’s accent will allow. Natasha feels the change the air brought on by one of Roger’s hands inching closed.

"Do you want to elaborate on that?"

"I’ve kept the matter intentionally private,” Vision replies. Rogers’s posture doesn’t relax. “It was suggested to me that I keep that capability . . . to myself.”

"Why?"

Vision opens his mouth, a quiet, irritatingly passive look on his face promising a too blunt retort that might just doom Rogers’s unsettled mood for good. Wanda spares them all with an interjection that’s no softer, but nevertheless better received—if only out of surprise.

"Because you look at him sideways,” she says, stepping forward, “even before you know that locked doors do not matter."

Natasha can see the memo cap is writing to himself in his mind as clearly as if it were stamped across his forehead—Call Stark. Update facility video surveillance—his closed fist falls open again, and aloud he says:

 “Fair enough.”

Wanda glances at Vision. He stares straight ahead. Rodgers continues.

“But,” he warns, “we won't get anywhere on secrecy, people. Ask Stark what happened the last time one of tried to keep a project to himself.”

Wanda glances at the floor. Natasha, crossing her arms, catches herself doing the same as the lights on her suit filter into her peripheral. Cap continues. "So, Vision, like I said: _Communication._ And Sam, Rhodes, I could say the same to you. Most of us speak combat, but the dialect isn't Air—"

"I swear,” Rhodes grumbles, “if you say Air Force.”

“You know what I mean, Marine: Just keep in mind who else is on the field. That also means looking down once in a while—try and remember that not all of us can fly. But I like the technique. Good work, to both of you. And you, Maximoff.”

Wanda lifts momentarily lowered, distracted eyes that are just wide enough to be called _surprised_. Rogers continues.

“I don’t know what to call that last thing you did,” he says, “but I liked it. Just be sure to keep it back unless you have to . . .  We're trying to level fewer cities from now on . . . Or at least until the UN hearings on Sokovia and Wakanda are finished."

For a man who’s always admired the idea of the United Nations, his tone is excessively dark; mired in other resentments Natasha has been sensing for weeks, but which he insists on keeping to himself.

"Don’t stop practicing it, though,” he adds, picking his attitude back out of the muck. “Talk about an ace in the hole."

Wanda blinks twice.

 “A secret weapon,” Natasha explains. Wanda nods.

"I was not planning on stopping," she replies, the words seasoned with a small smile.

"Good,” Rogers says. “So, overall, I’m proud of all you. But the next time we do this, I want to start work on cooperating between paired teams. Barton and Natasha have been perfecting that, so she'll be taking the lead on training it. Sam, you’ll be with—"

"Rhodes," Natasha blurts.

 Rogers turns to face her, twisting around at the waist so that he can stare at her with the better part of the vast expanse of his chest in view.  He has an _explanation owed, Romanoff_ look in his transparent-blue eyes. Natasha ignores him.

"And Vision, you're with Wanda,” she orders. “Start incorporating your teams into your solo workouts, and report to me if you think you're having a breakthrough. Sam and Rhodes, try to work out that offense/defense balance. Wanda, work on gaining some speed moving up the field . . . and that communication thing. You too, Vision."

Her words are met with nods from all but the star-spangled man beside her. When the recruits are gone, Rogers rounds on her completely.

"Ok, Romanoff,” he demands, “are you going to tell me where that came from?"

"I decided to emphasize communication.”

Rogers sighs. Stares her down. Natasha props a hand on her hip.

“Wanda,” she explains. “She’s onto something, but nobody but Vision is going to let her into their head in the middle of combat to perfect it."

"You think she was . . . _reading_ him the whole time?"

"Sure. His body can take a hit like that, but she wouldn’t just leave him pinned to the foundation just because it wasn’t actively killing him.”

"Right. So you want to what, turn her into a telepathic communications hub?"

" . . . Maybe. Comms do go out all the time, can be intercepted... Telepathy can't. Probably. Plus, I was thinking that, if she can track our movements on the field without getting distracted, it would be the end of guessing whether someone is off the radar because they're busy, or out cold. Which would sure save Barton a lot of grief."

Cap snorts. "I don’t think he'd exactly line up for Wanda the telepathic battle strategist. I wouldn’t."

"Rogers, you practically recruited her. You of all people should give her a shot."

"I did, and I am. I just draw the line at inviting her back into my head. There were a lot of things she stuck me with that I didn't need to know about myself."

"Uh-huh. I’ll take that as a,” she lowers her voice and puffs out her chest, “ _you handle this, Romanoff_ , then.”

"Whatever Romano—Where are you going?"

"To catch up with Team Two and make sure they got my drift. And that Vision knows he's not alone in his head. Or didn’t you wonder if he was in the dark, too?"

"It wasn't exactly my first concern.”

Natasha shakes her head, pushing away hair and the tight feeling in her stomach that says that comment should bother her. For one reason or another.

She finds Wanda and Vision together on the pedestrian skyway, Wanda leaning on the railing, fiddling with one of the innumerable rings on her fingers while Vision stares away over the edge of the elevated walkway, across the atrium, as if he could see the working of the universe from that vantage point. _He probably can._

"Hey, team."

Wanda straightens, and Vision turns to face Natasha as she approaches.

"I did not see any throwing," Wanda says.

"You didn’t notice going without comms? I managed.”

“I knew it.”

Natasha smirks. “Besides, we got a pretty good read on what you all could do with what we’d already set up. And then some, with that pillar coming down. You ok, Vizh?"

"Fine, thank you. Though I wouldn't say the same about the floor— I felt it crack as I passed through it."

"And heard it," Wanda adds. Natasha takes a spot against the opposite railing and leans.

"He heard it, or you heard it?"

". . . I did, with his ears." Wanda looks away, looks up, looks away, looks up. Tries to smile. Natasha props her forearms as well as her back against the rail.

"Is that a regular thing I should know about, or do you just look in on teammates who might be leaving Avenger shaped dents in the floor?"

“Only if the dent is shaped like Vision,” Wanda replies, glancing at the android in question.

"I told Wanda when we met,” he explains, “that she was welcome to look inside my head if it was what would made her comfortable. Having her do so from time to time has since proven convenient."

"You don't mind having someone looking at your thoughts?"

"Not in this case, no."

Vision’s tone is airy, but Wanda glances away from him and smiles, just a little at the corner of her mouth, at the implication. At the imbedded compliment.

"Ok . . . and Wanda, you don’t find it distracting to see what he's seeing at the same time that . . . you're seeing it?"

Wanda shakes her head, the smile still dancing with the corner of her mouth. "He has very ordered thoughts."

" . . . So you wouldn't be able to do it with another member of the team."

"Like in . . . in combat? You actually think they would let me?" She laughs in the sense that she seems to be using the same parts of her body to produce the sound as she would a laugh, though the noise itself is mirthless. "Tashka please. After what I did?  Stark and Rogers are no doubt telling Sam and James, none of them will trust me in their heads. True, they may not know it was happening at the time . . . But when they did find out, later? No. Besides, I could not keep track of so many, not all the time like Vision, anyway."

Natasha puts her hands up in surrender.

"I didn't say it was a great idea. Just . . . keep doing it with Vizh, ok, and let me know if it goes well?”

"I imagine," Vision says, "that if it does, you'll be able to see it."

Wanda throws him a look, a narrow eyed expression of disapproval.

"What?"

"Your manners," she replies, her glare twitching into half a grin as she looks at him. Turning to Natasha she adds "he is just being literal. If I have a breakthrough, I will let you know . . . But you get to explain it to the boys."

Shortly thereafter, as Natasha steps aside to take a call, Vision leans in towards Wanda. Soft spoken though he is, the sound carries on the walkway so near the atrium ceiling.

"You needn't defend me for snapping at anyone, least of all by lying."

"If I say you are being literal, it is because you are being literal. It is your attitude I would not speak out for."

Natasha hangs up on Clint without a word, keeping her phone to her ear. There's a lull in the conversation between the other two.

"How anxious do you suspect I've made them?"

Wanda doesn't answer. Vision doesn't sigh, but inhales, and pauses, conveying a similar sentiment. "As I thought."

Again, a lengthy pause. Natasha's phone vibrates against her ear as Clint places another call. Wanda speaks.

"They do not understand you," she says, "but they will be ok. They _do_ trust you . . . You at least have that."

There’s a pause too long to be called a pause. Their silent and unseen exchange behind Natasha’s back is unfathomable, though the itch to turn and look, to see whether Wanda is being consoled is terrible. When Vision does finally reply, it reveals nothing. He suggests a training session for tomorrow as if the exchange had never occurred.

Natasha surrenders and glances over her shoulder. Wanda is eyeing him with knitted brows. His face, as usual, is impassive. In a few seconds Wanda surrenders.

"Later, at sixteen-hundred. I want to make adjustments to my bike. Before it rains again and ruins the roads . . . you’re welcome to help."

 

 

 

 

 

 

III

 

Whenever it is that they train, it goes well. Seven weeks later, Wanda and Vision can communicate without a word, with Wanda acting like a tracking chip for him when he disappears from view. "Like half-listening to background music," she describes it, between explaining that he's six stories above the plaza where their latest firefight has pinned them. It's the new recruits’ first time out, and the mission is an impromptu one. They’re pinned down, nearing the end of a chase of a violent metal-armed fugitive with a reputation that doesn't match the defensive posture he's adopted.

"Target is across from us," Wanda relays, taking in Vision’s elevated worldview, staring for a moment into space, "prepping something... Large... A gun, or rocket launcher." _Great._

"Vision," Natasha orders through the comms instead of Wanda, "If you can stop him from loading that thing, do it, but stay back, and leave him for Cap. Sam, Rhodes, get around the back and block his exit. Same to you: try to leave him for Rodgers unless he gets out of sight. If he does, he’s free game.”

"I’d feel a lot better about that order if I understood who we were chasing," Rhodes calls back as he soars away overhead, wrapping around the derelict apartment complex where Barnes is making his stand.

"Nat's right on this one," Sam offers, for all the good it does. Cap, up ahead, contributes nothing.  Natasha shakes her head.

"Wanda, you take the left hand alley. I'll take the right. This guy is—"

Wanda shouts.

Vision hurls himself through a wall, appearing up above for a moment as a streak of yellow cape against a comparatively pale sun, and immediately halts as if suspended from the air itself. The shockwave from the rocket he'd been moving to prevent blasts Wanda and Natasha from their cover. They’ve been hunkered down behind a massive stone planter—a tree sized bowl fortunately filled only with small-rooted petunias and impact absorbing dirt that sprays in every direction as it shatters. The window of the bank it’s sitting in front goes the same way, raining glass from above. Wanda’s elbow smacks Natasha’s side as they both roll their faces and bodies away from the onslaught. She can feel glass crunching under hand as she struggles to right herself in the aftermath, but it makes no sound that can be discerned over the familiar ringing that, at least for the next few minutes, is all any of them will be able to hear.

Beside her, Wanda lunges less gingerly to her feet, pushing off the sidewalk, embedding glass in her palm.  Natasha shouts "get down" without hearing whether the words leave her mouth. Wanda streaks out of view.

Something claps across Natasha’s back hard enough to end the sentence in a wheeze she can't hear, the wind evacuating her lungs. Pulling her to his side with one arm, she thinks she can see Vision mouthing "sorry". Or saying it aloud. He has Wanda already beneath his other arm, sweeping them away from the ruined bank with his back turned towards the assault.

He releases them again behind another, still intact planter 20 yards away, hovering a few feet back, peering over the top of it while Natasha puts her back to it and Wanda leans around. She's focused on something up ahead, too low to be Barnes' hideout. _Cap._

He's sprawled on his back fifteen or twenty feet back from where he'd originally been standing, the fountain he'd been behind in ruins, his shield still clattering across the plaza. He gets up too slowly, reeling, and struggles to tear his hood off. Natasha can see his comm sparking as he does, leaving tiny, patchy burns on his cheek. If they hurt, he ignores them.

 Following his eyes, she doesn't need to be able to hear him shout to know why he does. Barnes has dropped his weapon, now sprinting away down the wraparound, exterior open hallway that provided access to the units of the building when there were still people living in them.

Cap wheels around. Natasha tries to call to him, for all the good it will do. If _her_ ears are ringing he, for the moment, must be all but deaf. And he isn't looking at her, anyway, but at Wanda. Chest heaving, desperation on his face, he jerks a finger towards his temple.

Wanda's eyes go red. Across the plaza, Cap grimaces, and nods. And Vision goes off like a shot in the most literal possible sense, blurring to a steak of green and yellow. He picks Cap up under his arm and flies him to the building, dropping him into the exterior hall at the other end of which a noiseless barrage of fire from Rhodes—no doubt orchestrated by Wanda, if the 180 degree turn he makes to pinpoint their fugitive's position is any indication—has Barnes pinned down.

_He wants us at the stairwells in case he tries that instead._

Natasha doesn’t hear the order so much as sees it, a projected image of what she _should_ be seeing, _will_ be seeing, once she follows it. A dusty stairwell, a heavy door, a gun in her hand, held out in front of her, maybe being used, maybe not. And for a moment she can also glimpse the glint of a metal limb, Rhode's view through his visor, the tint of Sam’s goggles, and a sharper but somehow-off elevated viewpoint that must be Vision's. And then Wanda breaks away, following the orders she’s just conveyed, retracting from her teammate’s skulls. Above them in the hall, Barnes is left with nowhere to go but back to the waiting arms Rodgers, bearing down on him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

IV

 

“And I thought I had it bad.”

Barnes’s words are few, and his ability to make eye contact nonexistent. He glances at the side of Vision’s head, though, where metal intersects with layers of synthetic skin, and speaks with what might be humor under its belligerent edge. Without uncrossing his arms, he jerks a metallic shoulder in the android’s direction. Vision stares back at him without a word. Barnes shifts in his chair.

He looks tidier now than he has in days, his hair pulled back from his face, shiny if split at the ends, wide blue eyes framed by slightly lighter halos of sleeplessness than before. He looks primarily at the floor, unraveling secret messages from the carpet, waiting for orders that no longer come.

Natasha remembers the feeling from a limbo-period somewhere between committing to SHIELD and re-learning how to use her own mind. To have it be her own mind, or anything but a lengthening list of assignments. For her it hadn’t been the carpet with the answers so much as Clint, though even for Barnes, Rodgers doesn’t seem ready to take over from pile, shag, or otherwise. He’s been in the gym too much, beating the sand out of bag after bag after bag as if they, like the carpet, might be full of the right words.

Barnes inhales loudly enough for it to be a reverse sigh, and turns on Natasha.

“I remember you,” he says.

“I bet you say that to all of the girls you shoot.”

He blinks in slow motion, staring into her with blank eyes masking a frantic looking soul.

“Only the ones who fought like they deserved to get away.”

Barnes looks at her, instead of the floor, as he speaks. And she knows she has a retort. Some sound to go with the combative jerk of her head. It just doesn’t make any sound, or manage to leave her throat.

Barnes looks back to the carpet.

“Were you Hydra?” he asks, staring at her feet, his crossed arms on his knees. The shirt he’s wearing reveals where the metal one meets his body, the flesh there red and angry, lightning strike scarring looking like a warning against infection even years after the fact. Natasha swallows twice.

“No.”

He glances up, glances down. _Go on and say it, Tasha. They can’t—they can’t anymore—_ Silence reigns supreme. She can feel even Vision looking at her, while Wanda looks at him, maybe communicating a _don’t ask_. She’s sitting in the armchair, her knees pulled up under her chin in terrycloth shorts and knee high socks that look strange after seeing her so much lately in her chosen costume. She glances at Natasha and waits, same as Barnes.

Every time the clock ticks, Natasha wonders if Thor has finally returned. The sound is so loud against the quiet. Her voice breaking it sounds like a little girl’s in her own ears, small and alone.

“Leviathan.”

Barnes looks up.

“If I had to guess, that’s the name you’d know them by.”

He looks at her, longer even than he had before, and nods without a word. The clock turns back into thunder.

When Wanda finally speaks, breaking apart the storm, she doesn’t sound like a child, even if her positioning and for once naked, un-made up eyes are reminiscent of one. Her hair is wild in its ponytail, surrendering to soft but messy natural curls she usually tames with braids, with its own length and weight, with heat. It had been funny, twenty minutes ago, before Barnes had walked in. Natasha had laughed at Vision’s reaction. A raised eyebrow silent start, and a botched hello cut short by observation. _Hello---curly._ As if with genuine surprise, taking her in with mechanically, visibly readjusting eyes. _Shut up, Vision._ With a broad smile.

“I was Hydra,” Wanda says, all somber now. “Made by them. We didn’t really know what they were at first, but my brother and I are—we were. Their experiments.”

Barnes looks at her. “What did they do to your brother?”

“ . . . Not as much as I did. In a way. With what I helped to start.”

“Wanda,” Natasha says, but she shakes her newly curly head.

“Ask Natasha,” she says to Barnes, “what the news didn’t say about Sokovia and Ultron. I do not know how to talk about it yet.”

Barnes nods, and looks back at the floor.  The clock is a cacophony. Wanda shifting is an orchestra of fabric noise. Natasha’s breathing sounds like a tornado roaring away inside her, rough in places, less than even, every small variation in human biology ringing in her ears.

Barnes looks back to Wanda.

“Whatever happens is always their fault,” he whispers. “At the bottom of everything. They have these ideas they put in your head.”

Wanda looks up, lips falling away from each other to better breathe in his words. Her expression looks tragic, but her eyebrows are lifted. And she nods.

She leaves a minute later. Vision goes with her.

 

 

 

 

 

V

 

The tension in the quinjet feels worse after the fight than before. Rogers and Stark stand at opposite ends of the craft, opposing each other across the walkway.

“I’d like to know more about this ‘Black Panther’ guy is all I’m saying, Cap.”

“Like his name?” Rodgers snaps. “I think he probably keeps it to himself for a reason.”

“Really, this—?”

Vision interrupts the stream of Stark’s words by rising from the pilot’s seat. A bar of green tinted vibranium bone bangs against the arm of the chair as he rises, ringing like Cap’s shield. The corner of his mouth twitches.

“Looks like it’s someone else’s turn,” Rhodes announces. Vision walks past him without explanation, headed in the direction of the bench, opposite Natasha, where Wanda is lying. She sits as he approaches. The mangled leftovers of his right arm are hidden beneath his cape, but it flutters as he walks, flashing glimpses of ruin at his teammates. Late in the fight, he’d taken the brunt of a massive blast at some incomprehensible density, a weight of tons—he cannot only lighten himself, as it turns out, but adopt the immovability of a vibranium wall—for all the good it had done him. He’d taken the shock on short notice. The arm he’d raised across his face must not have caught up to the density of the rest of him, and “arm,” therefore, is no longer the right word so much as “arm leftovers.” It’s hardly more than a hand and wrist hanging from sinew, now. His bicep was obliterated. The concave space where it should be fills up with his cape when he stops moving, standing over Wanda’s bench. She inches aside, to leave him a seat, pinching the liquid-metal consistency fabric of the cape between her thumb and forefinger as she goes so that it pulls away from the damage again. Vision pauses halfway to sitting down, watching her face as she inspects the synthetic analogue of gore now dominating her view.

Wanda’s face falls. The corners of her mouth turn down without taking the rest of her lips with them. She parts them as if to speak only to stop short at the smallest glimpse of teeth, halted by the weird symmetry of Vision’s exposed internal composition. The inside of him mimics the same geometric patterns as his exterior, with strips of muscle-akin plastic and vibranium _tissue_ all constructed into the same layered fabric-looking patchwork as is visible on his face, or even his clothes. Wanda studies it in silence for so long that Stark moving towards the pilot’s seat, only to have Rogers slide in ahead of him, becomes the focus of everyone else in the room. Vision’s broken limb forgotten. Then Wanda gasps. A horrible, ragged sound that comes out menacing in combination with a flash of red in her eyes.

Clint scrambles to his feet. Natasha yanks him back into place by the wrist. Barnes, a few seats’ worth of spacing away on the same bench, lifts an eyebrow. Natasha looks at him and rolls her eyes. He nods, a minute duck of his chin.

_Overreacting._

_Rodger that._

Barnes isn’t a bad guy, when he makes eye contact. And not a bad teammate, when he’s able to stay himself. He has a certain fugue state tendency. Rogers talks him out of it. Natasha, today, had simply kicked him in the shin and called him a homicidal idiot. Later, he’d whispered a thank you for it. Now, he’s staring at Wanda in silence just like the rest of them.

Vision pulls away from her grasp and seats himself beside her, Wanda’s eyes never leaving him. Her expression remains aghast.

“Wanda?” Natasha asks. Wanda shakes her head, speaking to Vision instead of to her.

“You’re in pain,” she says. Her voice is like a shout forced down to the volume of silence, still struggling to be heard, and her tone is accusatory.

“I am fine,” he replies.

Stark raises an eyebrow, departing the wall he’s been leaning on.

“You can feel pain?”

 _Is it that surprising?_ Natasha wonders, though she leaves that fight to Wanda, who takes affront with a vengeance. She jerks her head around to stare at Stark, ponytail snapping like a whip, glowering at him with naked and unexpected vitriol. Stark sputters. Wanda turns away again, sliding down the bench so that she can bring her legs onto it, perching sideways and cross legged while she lifts Vision’s cape away again. He looks away from her.

 “I receive a variety of sensory feedback,” he tells Stark. His voice is a half-step higher than it should be, the way JARVIS used to sound when advising against something stupid, but it’s devoid of intonation. He is flat and aloof, for once an actual robot. “It‘s not the same thing.”

Beside him, Wanda scoffs. He turns to look down at her. He’s sitting straight. She’s hunched over with her hand suspended over his.

“That _feedback_ ,” she retorts, eyes once again going as red as her new name, “is pain.”

He stares back at her in lengthy silence. Wanda scowls, though her jaw is clenched, turning her temples concave, and there’s a furrow between her eyebrows deep enough to get lost in. Vision glances at the floor, processing before he speaks.

“But I _will_ be fine,” he says. “My tissues are self-repairing, Wanda. It just takes—time.”

He shifts his arm as he speaks. The motion splits his sentence.  Wanda leans away from him with despairing eyes, total incomprehension in the half open, then closed, wordless motion positioning of her mouth. Vision stares straight ahead long enough for her silence to become concerning. When she continues to say nothing, something accusatory but still achingly empathetic plastered on her face, he glances at her. There’s a strand of her ponytail caught in her collar.  Vision pivots to reach it with his functional arm, stretching a gloved hand along her collarbone and lifting it away. Wanda continues to stare him down.

And then she drops her hand down on top of his.

“Fine,” she says. Vision jumps. Not a Vision jump where he stands a little straighter, snaps his head up with a gathering heat in the gem in his forehead, but an actual shocked retraction of his entire body. Except for his hand and the leg it rests on, now sandwiched between his thigh and Wanda’s palm.  Barton nudges Natasha with his elbow. She shakes her head. The quinjet is silent but for the sound of Rogers turning in his chair to find out why. Natasha leans over, in Barnes’s direction, to get a better look at the exchange.

Vision’s face is caught somewhere between cold, metallic stoicism and imploring desperation, his eyes mismatched with the set of his jaw, the positioning of his brows. His hand under Wanda’s is bare, the glove blasted away, but her gloves are still on. Her palm seems to glide across his skin as she runs it up his arm to the still intact elbow. The microscopic gears in Vision’s eyes adjust, dilating them. Wanda’s eyes swirl scarlet.

“What are you doing?” he asks. It’s the closest to breathless Natasha has ever heard him, pauses digging their foxholes at awkward intervals between the words.

“Providing sensory feedback,” Wanda retorts.

“I can’t track tissue replication . . .” he stutters, dark eyed and stiff backed, “with you doing that.”

Wanda’s eyes lose their spark.

As they do, Vision’s, too, return to their version of normal. As Wanda releases him, he makes a strangled, sharp noise that might, just might, be a muffled groan, and which sends Clint’s eyebrows halfway up his forehead. Barnes looks sideways at Natasha. She replies with a minute, one-shouldered shrug.

“Do you know the expression of looking gift horses in their mouths?” Wanda asks; focused solely on the injured android and his response to the returning not-the-same-thing-as-pain. He’s clamped what’s left of his arm against his side and lost some of his straight posture to a position suspiciously reminiscent of doubling over.

“I—” Vision falters. His words still seem to be buffering even as they leave his mouth, “may be beginning to understand its meaning.”

“That is what I thought.”

Wanda pulls her own glove away and returns her hand to his. Her eyes ignite with clouds of red. Vision’s, too, change again, dilating and doing something else Natasha can’t wrap her mind around in the brief window before he closes them. He clears his throat. The quinjet becomes a home to silence that’s robbed, after a moment, by Barnes.

“What _are_ you doing?” he blurts.

 Wanda, staring with eerie fixation into a point in the middle distance that to her must embody the inside of Vision’s mechanical head, answers with obvious distraction, like a woman daydreaming.

“I’m making him feel this part if his arm . . . more than that part. And giving him something,” she runs her palm up his bare red forearm to the elbow and back down to his hand, “ _to_ feel. Although—”

Her mouth bursts into a smile that looks positively maniacal with her eyes still alight.

“Although?” Rhodes presses.

“I can also feel him healing,” she says. “It’s so fast.”

“Uh-huh,” Stark interjects. Wanda ignores him, enraptured.

“ . . . Hey, Maximoff,” he adds, tone warning of an imminent Stark-humor jibe. She tilts her head in his direction. The focus is still absent from her eyes. “Why don’t we all get the pain-versus-pleasure treatment?”

Wanda withdraws a canister, familiar to all of them, from her belt without looking for it. Clint scowls at it. Like Natasha, he’s been knocked out by the aerosol anesthetic on a few occasions—many, in his case—when injured and overloaded by pain.

“Because _you_ have this,” she announces. “Come here and smell it, Stark, and I will show you how it works.”

Clint and, of all people, Barnes, laugh aloud. Tony feigns injury, rolling his eyes. Rhodes praises her.

“Nice one,” he says.

Wanda says “I know,” and lapses into silence.

The novelty of Wanda’s bedside manner wears off quickly. Stark attempts to talk to Rogers—only to be forced to surrender by single syllable answers—before he retreats below decks. Sam comes up in his place asking for an update Rodgers seems unwilling to give. Barnes stares after the two of them with something animal in his eyes, watching the back of Rogers’s head like a predator sensing a trap. Clint leans back against the wall and closes his eyes. Natasha watches the Vision.

He sits, straight backed. His expression is immobile, but stiff even for him. To Natasha’s prying eyes the set of his brows looks to be fighting with the set of his mouth and the tension in the parts of his temples not masked by metal. As if the stillness of his face were the sole product of what he is, rather than the result of the composure he tries to convey: That Vision is an emotional being goes unstated, but the fact exists. He has a dramatic temperament. Natasha has never seen him angry, has never seen him _do_ anything that couldn’t be explained by the logic of efficiency and his elevated understanding of the world, but he has the same manner as an old spy she’d once known. Smooth. Seasoned. Ready to turn and snap, too many years of pressure, or preparedness, locked away just out of sight. She suspects that if she were to ask Wanda what his tidy thoughts belied, the description she’d give would amount to something like an ordered tempest ruled by egalitarian laws of high and low pressure and wind patterns and moisture; explainable until it makes landfall and tears manmade constructs asunder.

It explains why he gets along so well with Wanda. The woman running her fingertips back and forth along his forearm is less like a storm than a volcano, even if she looks docile enough as she inches closer to a slouch, her eyes far away and lost in the sensation of her own hand as seen by his mind. She falls farther into whatever she’s doing, whatever potentiality she’s projecting, and closer to Vision’s side, curled into a posture of relaxedness with her elbows propped against her knees. She sets her other, open palm at the fold of his elbow. The gestures of her still moving hand grow smaller and automatic. But she has that smile, again. A parted lip look playing with the corners of her mouth as she marvels over what only she can see, dreams of electric sheep or new tissues forming with vibranium shells. She has a charming, single-minded capacity for wonderment, so when it breaks without warning, and she snaps back into the world, it startles her audience of one.

Wanda jolts upright with a gasp and a sudden smothering of the light in her eyes. Her mouth hangs open after the sound is gone. In front of her, Vision’s eyes move under his lids. Natasha catches the motion as she follows Wanda’s gaze from his face down to her hands. The one she’d been tracing his material existence with has been immobilized. Vision’s fingers are closed around it.

The not-quite grin of her earlier musing returns and bursts into a broad, beaming smile that puts color in her cheeks to match her eyes. Natasha can see them clouding over again before she lowers her head, hiding her expression behind a curtain of hair, her face turned down over their clasped hands.

Natasha drives her elbow into Clint’s ribs. He jolts awake, already scowling at her, though he knows better than to respond with words when she’s woken him without them. She motions with her head for him to follow her out. Stark is already below decks, but is lost in a world of headphones—blaring what sounds like Suicidal Tendencies, of all things—and tinkering with one of his gauntlets. So it’s there that Natasha whispers to a flabbergasted Clint—unraveling weeks’ worth of un-quantified observations to see if he detected the same patterns she has—until the facility appears below and Rogers calls them up, ordering buckles on as they navigate the torrential, high-wind-agitated downpour that serves as their welcome home.

Natasha glances at Wanda as she fights the wind tossed jet to get to her seat. Her eyes are normal again, staring straight ahead. She has no love for enclosed spaces when they’re not bucking back and forth to the tune of screeching metal. Vision—whose triceps has returned already, though not his bicep—mutters something to her. Wanda only nods.

“Hold on, everyone,” Rhodes says from the pilot’s seat. He’s switched with Rogers at some point in the last couple of hours, washing Natasha with relief. Rogers has a less than stellar landing record. Rhodes, on the other hand, appears capable of flying or at least directing everything with wings. Or without them. He brings the quinjet in with all the grace the weather will allow. It’s admirable flying not reflected in Wanda’s wild-eyed expression. She’s gone from looking at the wall to looking at everything. Natasha turns as far around as the harness on her seat will allow.

“Hey girl,” she calls over the din of metal and thunder, “what is it?”

Her reply sends a hot-cold shiver to match the lightning down Natasha’s spine.

“There is something in the rain.”

Vision, too, is staring at the ceiling as if to see through it, though his expression is more discerning than Wanda’s. She’s knitting her hands in her lap. Natasha sees that, and remembers eyes that clouded over green, and the premeditated calm that kept them brown. She swallows, readying herself for a similar speech as she’d have used on Bruce.

“Wanda? Hey, we’re almost back on the ground. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it. What in its right mind would attack us on our home turf?”

“I don’t believe we need to fear an attack at all, Na—” Vision begins, but his words are cut short by a cacophonous thud against the roof and the sinking sensation of the jet losing fifteen feet of elevation all at once. Wanda screams. Her hands fly to her armrests. But as they go, a swirl of red comes with. Her eyes match by the time Rhodes steadies the quinjet. Vision is saying something to her, “Wanda, wait,” but her eyes are already turned, burning, on the roof. She throws her palms up. A shockwave of scarlet blasts through the jet, passing straight through the hull to disrupt the rain outside.

“Nice, Maximoff,” Rogers calls from up front.

“I don’t know that Thor is going to agree with that, Cap,” Stark retorts.

Natasha whips around to face the windshield. Out in front of them, something else red is tumbling away through the rain. Thor beats the jet into the hanger in the sense that he crashes to the runway and skids along the floor, crashing to a stop against a stack of shipping crates stamped STARK at the far end.

“Whoops,” Natasha says. The word comes out in a chorus. Natasha is the soprano, Clint and Barnes the tenor and baritone.

Wanda’s hands fly over her mouth, and are still there when they land. And when they exit the jet. Thor pulls himself from the pile of crates, dusting himself off, flinging his cape back over his shoulder, and stares down at her.

“Friend Wanda,” he thunders, “is that any way to greet a long absent companion?”

She drops her hands, all enormous eyes and pursed, quivering mouth. But Thor stops her apology with a grin. He approaches in a few short strides and claps her—lightly, though it makes her stumble all the same—across the shoulder.

“I only jest,” he assures her. “I stand impressed by your defense of our friends and their craft.”

Wanda exhales as if she means it to be words, though no sound escapes. But she does smile, if only a little. Thor beams, and turns his attention to Vision, exclaiming over his arm, remaining patient though the android’s measured explanation of self-restoring tissue and his dismissals of its severity.

“He says that,” Clint grumbles from Natasha’s left. She rounds on him, _don’t you dare pick on her, Barton, or I will make you regret everything I just told you, I swear to God._ Clint catches her eye and smirks.

“Explain yourself, bowman.” Thor demands, crossing his arms. It’s more theatricality than the comment deserves, which is precisely why he does it.

“You missed a real display of our little witch’s mental healing potions.”

Wanda’s eyes narrow. Natasha roles hers.

“He _means,_ ” she says, “that we probably shouldn’t keep Vizh standing around here with us. The only reason he’s not in silent agony is because Wanda’s gotten so good with her . . .” telepathy isn’t entirely the right word, so Natasha waves a hand over her eyes while she struggles to think of a better one, which is all Thor requires.

“I see,” he says. Bellows, as is his way. “Vision—”

He turns to their injured teammate with an offer of additional power supply, spinning Mjolnir around his wrist.

“A tempting offer,” Vision replies, “though excessive, I think, in this case. I will be fine in an hour or so.”

“Why wait?”

Thor turns along with the rest of them to note Maria Hill as she strides into the hanger. “Doctor Cho’s second cradle just arrived. If you all want to start forming a line . . .”

Clint groans, rubbing his side. “No thanks,” he mutters. Vision, however, is less inclined to argue, and follows her out with Thor in tow. Mjolnir slung over his shoulder by the wrist strap, he motions for the rest of them to follow. They do, but Wanda is slow to move. Clint throws a raised-brow, pouty-pursed lip look at Natasha: the Scarlet Witch is watching the android go, rubbing in a daze at her hand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

VI

 

They have a meeting room, a long ovular conference table with a broken shield in the middle. Vibranium cracked along the precise lines of the particular resonance of a single blast. Rhodes and Hill are the only ones not staring at it. They've gone to do damage control. To tell the press. The president. The UN. Natasha wonders which words they'll use, if they'll dance around it, or say it straight: “Steve Rogers—Captain America—is dead.”

Barnes is clinging to his armrests. He's crushed the left one. No one says anything. He's curled over the table, his forehead ready to touch it, the color gone from his face. He looks clammy, and ill; ready to bolt but trapped in place. Stark's positioning isn't much different. His elbows driven into his thighs, chair pushed away from the table, he's had his head in his hands for minutes on end. For the first time in the years Natasha has known him, he is _silent_.

Sam has the gentlest posture. A hand over his mouth. The saltwater running from his eyes follows his fingers across his cheek, the tears running sideways before they fall. Beside him, Clint is still. T'challa stiller. Their newest member is quiet, reserved, precise, with a handsome mouth and near-black brown eyes that match his skin as well as his alias. Stripped down to the spandex many of them wear beneath their suits, he looks more like an athlete than a reinstated monarch. Wanda looks like a child. She’s pulled her knees up into her chair with her, curled against the arm rest with her wild hair overflowing into Vision’s seat. She’s wrapped up around herself as if to protect the center of her being. Like Sam, she cries in silence. Like Natasha, she looks as though she has a void where her gut should be.

Natasha herself is empty.

She feels like a human hole. A puncture wound in the universe with her limbs serving as the tattered edges, her hollowed out stomach and chest cavity an imploding, lightless singularity leading nowhere. She can’t sit up straight. The gravity of emptiness is too strong. And so she sits, hunched, her palms flat against the table, grasping at the others with her eyes as she seeks something, anything but the broken shield in the middle of the table to fill herself with.

Anger is the most attainable patch she can perceive. She just lacks the strength, for the moment, to reach out and take it. They all do. Except for Vision. Of the shocked and grieving expressions in the room, his is the only one that indicates fury. There’s a furrow in his forehead, a seam formed by the downward point of the inner edges of his brows. They throw his eyes into shadow.  He breathes—he does breathe, after a fashion—with flared nostrils. The tension in his jaw answers the question of whether he also has vibranium in his teeth: if he didn’t, the force per square inch he’s subjecting them to would have already cracked them. His hands, resting on his knees, are coiled into fists.  _Be angry, Vizh. Be angry for all of us._ Angry, leastwise, with something other than themselves.

As if he can hear her thoughts, or perhaps because she’s been staring at him now for what could be seconds or could be days with the glaze she can _feel_ in her own eyes, he glances at her. A quick motion of his whole head, towards her and then away, staring dead ahead, boring invisible holes into the table with his darkened eyes to match the new hole in Natasha’s soul. He swallows before he speaks.

“All of this,” he says, a dangerous, splintering calm marring his neat, inherited accent, “because he wanted to keep our names off a list.”

 _Finally someone says it._ A glance at Clint tells her that he’s thinking the same thing, thinking of years and years of on-record SHIELD service—and his family safe at home. Thinking of the amnesty they’d both been granted for her infamous—and his little known—past actions. _You won’t arrest us,_ she’d told someone once. A room full of officials. And they hadn’t.

But at the head of the table, Barnes pitches forward in his chair. The broken armrest clinks. He turns his face towards his natural arm, his eyes shut tight enough to put lines and seams in his face that belong to an older man. A man his actual age. Stark sinks so far forward that his hands, still over his face, impact his legs.

Wanda, too, puts her face in her knees. The muffled noise that escapes her would sound like a laugh it weren’t so choked and drowning. Perhaps because she’s too close to him to ignore, perhaps because she is who she is, Vision turns his head and attempts to look at her. The anger in his expression doesn’t match the braced and injured look in his eyes. It’s a hollow look, like remorse.

Wanda lifts her head.

“He . . .” she dares to explain, knowing that his opinion, his understanding, if not his actions differ from hers, “ _believed_ he was keeping us free.”

She glances at Natasha when she says _believe_ , dancing around her own well known opinion. She’s never said much out loud to justify it, a reclusive defensiveness masked by words and cold eyes the dominant Wanda-paradigm through the whole of everything while the rest of them were shouting, snapping, fighting.

“Free to what?” Vision retorts. His voice sounds strained. Cold, but stretched. The sound of his words is broken by the rattle of broken vibranium as Sam drops the hand that’s been across his mouth, bringing it down in a fist against the table. Wanda looks at him with desperate, furrowed brows that beg for peace. Clint also straightens up.

“It’s a question, Sam,” he says.

Wanda glances back and forth between them, mouth falling open, folds and wrinkles forming in her forehead as her brows knit upward, leaving their outside ends behind as if to form an arrow leading to her hairline. She responds with caution, animal wariness, but no red in her eyes.

“Free,” she manages, voice like a whisper growing stronger as she goes, “to be heroes at all.” Vision stares at her. She laughs. The sound is like a gargle, short and twisted and wrong.

“Look at our histories, Vision. Do you believe the _world_ would let us be here, knowing the red in our ledgers?”

She uses the phrase wrong, drawing on an implication Natasha herself has given it through repeated usage: the idea that the debt she refers to is red not with ink, but blood. Clint winces. _The answer to that is yes._ He knows it, Natasha knows it. They’ve lived it. But they hold their silence. Natasha doesn’t have the strength to fight Wanda’s fears, or the way her voice breaks between _let_ and _us. Let_ with the faithless dismay of a girl who grew up trampled on, who played so many of her cards wrong. _Us_ with an echo; a whisper from Pietro’s ghost.

No one argues. Not Stark, who’s still folded over like living origami, nor T’challa, who looks like he has a comment—on those who wish to avoid a conflict of interest—meant on Sam’s behalf as much as his. Sam had his wings taken away once already, and drawing public ire in the military’s direction through the Avenger’s often destructive missions is something he knows, in his heart of hearts, would violate a responsibility to his uniform he’d sworn to uphold. Even if he no longer wears it. But T’challa says nothing.

The ensuing quiet is brief, and worse than before.

Vision inhales, ready to speak, and Wanda uncurls, snapping to straight-backed posture even as her fingernails dig into to her knees.

 _“Vision_ ,” she chokes. His name shatters in her mouth even as it glides over her distended Sokovian _zh,_ sounding like a plea and an order all at once. Her eyes flash, his darken. Natasha wonders which potentiality she shows him: the one she fears will come from any more of this conversation, or the one she fears will not. Vision’s response to whichever it is, is to swallow and fall silent. And silent the room stays, the uneasy peace their witch has brewed reverberating off a broken shield.

Barnes makes it forty more seconds in the vacuum of quiet.

When he snaps he makes a sound—one he can’t have meant to make aloud—like he’s been strangled and what they’re all hearing is his last not-breath death throw, and pushes out of his chair, sending it halfway across the room as he bolts for the door.

“James,” Natasha calls after him. But he doesn’t stop. She swings free of her own chair without pushing it back, bringing her knees up and over the armrest, and lunges after him.

 

 

 

 

 

VII

 

The first time Natasha _sees_ Thanos, there's a disconnect. In size and armor-shine he's intimidating; but he's not a megalomaniacal robot. He's not an alien army. He's _purple._

It's when he's tearing Vision out of the air, when he's shorting out her teammate— answering a blast from the gem in his forehead with one from his gauntlet—when he's prying Vision’s essence out of his head like a rock from between the rubber tread of her running shoes and dropping him, dead ringing-vibranium weight to the ground in a heavy heap, that she understands why she's supposed to be afraid.

T'challa smothers Wanda's blood-congealing scream, but not her hands. As the rest of them go for cover with the stolen moments the heap of metal and tissue that once was Vision bought them, there erupts a sphere of red, vaporizing the landscape beneath their feet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIII

 

Vision's empty body returns to them, at the end of the last battle, in the arms of a creature that looks like a tree and can say only his name. Of all they've seen in the last few days, hours, weeks—however long this impossible rendition of reality has been under the influence of the Time Stone—Groot isn't even the strangest thing. That honor belongs to the furious, talking, gun wielding raccoon at his side. The one clutching the last, yellow-gold stone the so called Guardians had pried from the gauntlet in the aftermath in a suspended force-field.

Groot passes the limp and lifeless Vision off to Thor. The raccoon closes his grabby black hands around the controls for the field holding the stone. Stark looks at him from beneath a mask of mouthless titanium. He looks more threatening that way, for better or for worse. Worse, he must think, since the suit’s helmet slides open a moment later as he addresses the one human among the group they have, for the moment, loosely termed as allies. Danvers at least seems to think highly of the “Guardians,” if not so highly of Quill’s attitude, and as the most experienced spacefarer among them, the muscular blonde’s opinion carries weight despite her newness to the group. Standing off to Stark’s right with masked and narrowed eyes drilling through Quill’s head, she crosses her arms and adopts the posture of intimidation he seems unwilling to take. She and Wanda both.

Now-Captain James Barnes—in a darker rendition of the stars and stripes than his predecessor had worn—glances sideways at Natasha till he knows he has her attention, and then glances at Wanda. Her hair curling and knotted, her appearance as bedraggled as the rest of them, but she looks nevertheless wilder, more capable of doing something desperate. Or stupid. Or cataclysmic. Her eyes haven’t been less than pink in so long now that Natasha is beginning to question whether they’ve ever been any other color. The only person in the group who might be able to match the fury in her face is Thor. His hair is equally disheveled, the long cut marring his cheek having turned several strands of it red. He takes Vision and lays him out on the ground at his feet and un-loops Mjolnir from his belt with a terrible coldness in his eyes that promises lightning at the least. Maybe something worse. Cosmic thunder to match the electricity.

The green alien woman across from them looks at him and bares her teeth. She has a gun at her hip and her hand works towards it. Quill notices out of the corner of his eye and scrambles to stop her.

“Whoa, whoa whoa, Gamora, just hold on.”

Her fingers twitch. She doesn’t touch the holster or its contents, but her hand looks nowhere near ready to lower. She scowls at Quill, and snaps something at him Natasha doesn’t have the translator to comprehend it. Most of what they address to the Avengers arrives in eerily familiar, mildly accented “galactic standard” English established, they were told, in the event of contact with “Terra.” Whatever Gamora says, however, she keeps between herself, Quill, Stark and Rhodes, whose suits’ computer systems have the capacity—which standard comms lack—to process the translation files they were offered.

“So,” Quill says to Stark in less frantic tones, “you’re serious. You want to take this thing back.”

“Even though you lost it once already,” Gamora spits. Groot says his name.

“Yeah,” Stark replies. “We do.” It’s casual words, but not a casual tone that he uses. Stark’s threats are few and far between and usually come through a metal mask. When they emerge in any other context, it’s enough to put all of the remaining Avengers on edge. Though she keeps her arms crossed, Natasha widens her stance. Beside her, Wanda’s eyes go from pink to bloody red.

“You know we can’t do that.”

Repulsors have a distinctive whine, a buzzing wind-up that’s misleadingly inoffensive and that everyone among them but the Guardians know by heart. The tune is a precursor to a threat they can’t recognize, though the light in Stark’s palm is hard to miss. Whatever words he has to follow this gesture with are, however, drowned out by a voice filtered through gritted teeth, tempered by an accent almost too strong to follow between the desperation behind her words and the delirious exhaustion that Wanda’s constant on-edge state has been slowly inducing for hours.

“You can,” she snaps, “and you will. I will show you, if you do not believe me.”

“Is that a threat, sorceress?” Gamora snaps, but she steps back. Her hand stays by her gun. But it doesn’t move any closer, either. She has reason for concern. In the course of their first meeting, Wanda had nearly vaporized her right along with the hunk of asteroid she and Quill had been standing on. It wasn’t a small hunk.

Natasha feels James’s eyes on her, and imagines she can read his thoughts. _She’s losing it, Natalia._ She glances at him, and blinks in Morse. _No,_ as in _no, not yet she isn’t._ Not that anyone would blame her if she did—not after this. After what they’ve seen. What they’ve lost. And especially not if the Guardians try to take Vision from them, too—the one teammate there’s a chance, even a snowball’s chance, of restoring to life.

“You are holding our friend’s life in your hands,” she continues, palms open at her sides despite the angle it forces on one clearly broken wrist, “and it is not yours to decide.”

“His life, maybe not,” Rocket snarls back at her, “but the safety of the galaxy? I think our purview, lady.”

Wanda steps forward, misting red swirls of energy bleeding from her hands, wrapping up her arms, around her body, down her legs; tangling in her hair.

If there’s a moment to be sensible, to pull back and take Wanda with them, to avoid a final fight when none of them, any of them, have any more to give, it’s now. Natasha can feel it. James reaches out for a moment, gloved metal bumping her hand. He can feel it, too. And along down the line the sensation moves, the now-or-never precipice looming up in front of them in shades of scarlet.

And then Stark’s mask snaps shut. As does Rhodes’s. A paler light than Wanda’s wells around Danver’s fists. Clint knocks an arrow. Others change their stances. Spinning, Mjolnir whistles. Vision lies motionless.

And Wanda, of all people, halts her forward march.

She looks back over her shoulder, inspecting the team behind her—what’s left of it—with sudden horror in her eyes. Her own eyes, back for the first time in eons to their natural color. The red peels away from her body, leaving her pale and fragile and shaking. She mouths something before she falls to her knees. Across from them, Gamora finally lowers her hand, and looks sideways at Quill . . . who finally looks afraid.

Natasha lurches towards her friend, but James catches her in a well-meant metallic vice. He says her name, and only her name, so she follows his gaze. He’s looking the same place Wanda is looking: at Vision, piled in the dust between Thor’s splayed feet. Natasha whirls around.

“Wanda—”

The world erupts.

It begins near the ground, a cataclysm of red. The mists that wrapped around Wanda a moment ago like spring tendrils now coat every fiber of her as she throws her head back, her expression a silent scream made horrible, made a death mask, by the replacement of her eyes by a scarlet glow so red it becomes white—like the surface of some distant sun. The burst of energy that peels off of her in the next moment mirrors that same image. It moves in a sphere, expanding like a supernova; and as it goes the universe burns, scorched all the way down to nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIX

 

The world reappears in white.

The music that heralds its arrival is a chorus of gasping, shouts and screams and scrambling. When the Guardians rematerialize against the backdrop of receding, blinding light that paints everything Natasha sees, Groot is thundering his name with what almost sounds like vitriol while Rocket clings to his legs, still as a playing-dead-possum and quite possibly scared to death. Quill has been knocked flat on his face. Gamora bends over him, yanking him upright by his shirt collar, screaming at him and choking him at the same time out of what is clearly concern and some variety of love.

The Avengers fare no better. A minute passes before anyone can get a response from either Stark or Rhodes, both of whom are blessed, _blessed_ by an oxygen supply in otherwise dysfunctional suits. Mjolnir is knocked from Thor’s hand, and he himself is sprawled several feet back from where he started, though Vision’s body hasn’t moved at all. Natasha emerges in the aftermath wrapped in James’s arms, even the metal one too much a relief not to feel warm.

Wanda lays motionless in the dust.

James releases her, and Natasha bolts, falling over her, shaking her, stroking her hair away from her face. She’s alive, but pallid and shivering. She opens her eyes, and for a moment they’re white and red, but only because they’re rolled so far back in her skull as to be full of nothing but whites and capillaries instead of pupils and irises. Her mouth quivers. All the color is gone from her lips, as it is from the rest of her. She’s so pale that her brunette waves look black by contrast.

“Wanda? Wanda, it’s going to be ok, do you hear me? You’re ok, we’re all ok—” on the ground Wanda seizes, a wordless and horrifying way of catching Natasha in her lie. It brings her back off the ground in a vertebrae grinding arch, driving her head and heels into the dirt. Her lips shake some more. There’s a pattern to it, though. Natasha leans in, trying to hear her. But Wanda goes still. Her eyes close.

“Wanda! No, no no no, _Wanda,_ sweetie,come back.” Come back and quip at Stark, be a companion to James, to Sam. Come back and squabble about the merits of Russian versus Sokovian food, come back and grin like a maniac while experimenting a little longer with the newest trick the energies trapped in her mind and hands have proven capable of giving her—the ability to not only hover, but fly. _Come back so you can make good on that joke about a cape._

Her head lolls.

And she groans. Her eyes flicker open just long enough to tease at dilated pupils without a hint of red.

“I,” the grunt becomes, the sentence scattered by the effort of her heaving, panting breaths, “made it  . . . all right. Do not . . . have to fight. Tell them, Tashka. No fighting.”

She bumps Natasha’s stomach with one clenched hand, and she looks down, bewildered. There’s a whole circle of Avengers around them now despite Clint’s best efforts to wave them back: “Give her some air, for the love of God.” Somewhere in the indistinct background Gamora is bellowing at Quill, who’s making demands of a baffled and stumbling Stark.

Natasha closes her hands around Wanda’s, peeling her fingers back. Every ounce of strength she has left seems to be going into keeping her hand closed, her slender fingers and sharp nails proving admirably resistant. When they do open, they crack open like an oyster around a pearl. A warm, yellow-gold, twisting-energy-containing, almost sentient-seeming, pearl.

 

 

 

 

 

X

 

“I’m fine, Tashka, I’m fine,” Wanda protests. They’ve got her propped up on the ramp into the only craft available to take them home, some contraption similar in size to a quinjet provided by Quill’s _Nova Corpse_ associates. Thor’s cloak is laying across her lap—covering her folded, gem clutching hands—a supply pack from the ship and Clint’s quiver behind her back. The archer in question is beside Natasha, staring at Wanda, shaking his head in mute awe. A few yards away, James is trying for third or fourth time to express exactly _how_ in the dark they are about the entire exchange, stepping in to take some of the heat for Stark. It’s Thor, upon returning from some kind of Asguardian conference call, that is the first to offer a viable hypothesis.

“Friend Wanda,” he says, seating himself down the ramp from her with crossed legs. That’s become his name for her since the incident with the hanger. She smiles when he calls her by it, “has your strength much returned?”

“I feel much better,” she replies. “What do you know about . . . _that_?”

She jerks her head in the direction they’d come from. Natasha had carried her, slung across her shoulders army style. James had held the mind stone in the safety of his left fist until Wanda, previously in and out of consciousness, awoke completely and demanded it back. No one had argued with her.

“What is apparent,” Thor concedes, “is a disruption of what is. Heimdall reports an instant in which he could see you both with, and without, the stone; both valid, both real.”

“ _What is?_ ” Natasha snaps.

“Reality.”

Wanda bursts into a loud guffaw. It’s a nervous, weakened sound.

“ _Reality_ ,” she giggles. “You are kidding with me.” She sounds as if she’s begging him rather than accusing him. “That is impossible.”

“Perhaps not,” he replies. He glances at her hands, hidden beneath his cloak, wrapped around the mind stone with neither fear nor hesitation; as if it were no more than a rock. She follows his eyes and frowns. It isn’t a rock, after all, and she knows as well as anyone its reputation for brainwashing and capacity for manipulation. Clint won’t come any closer to her so long as she’s touching it, just as Helen still skirts Vision with several feet to spare despite their generally friendly rapport. Wanda withdraws her hands from beneath the cloak to look at it, frowning.

“Strucker had the scepter,” she mutters, but will say no more. She crams her hands back under her improvised blanket, shaking her head for the duration.

Natasha takes her lead, as does Thor. Balking is easier, leastwise for now, than asking how accurate that hypothesis might be. _That_ would beg further questions: such as the scope of change Wanda could implement provided with adequate emotional fuel. Natasha glances towards the cabin of the ship. Vision is stretched out inside, Stark bent over him, scanning and tweaking and muttering to Friday, the new voice of the suit standing—independent of him—a few feet away.

Wanda follows Natasha’s gaze. Her eyebrows come together. It’s one desperate look that’s getting familiar.

“He’s doing all he can,” Natasha consoles her. “He said the other physical damage wasn’t that bad, we just want to try and bring his density back down before trying to put anything back . . .  I guess he was pretty well braced for the hit.” _Other than the part where his power source was ripped from his head._ Wanda nods. She isn’t listening.

It’s an hour before Stark declares that things as good as they’re going to get. An hour fifteen before some last efforts at momentumless arguing gives way to Thor carrying Vision back outside.

In that time Wanda’s recovery is remarkable. She cat-naps on and off for a while, leaning on Natasha’s shoulder, and wakes with shaky limbs but too-bright eyes, the color back in her cheeks. She manages to walk alongside Natasha with only their interlocked elbows for support; though she stumbles four times in a walk of only thirty feet. Balance, it would seem, is the component of locomotion still missing. Missteps and loose stones send her nearly to her knees, though the force of her arm closing around Natasha's is crushing every time.

Thor sets Vision down a safe distance from the ship. The dirty ground seems an unfit place to attempt a Lazarus, but the interior of the ship won’t do, and the compromise they’d struck with Guardians somehow brave enough to argue even after Wanda changed out the universe requires they stay local.

Thor turns, and waits. He extends a massive hand to Wanda when she and Natasha draw near enough. She takes it with her left, her right pinned to her chest, a flesh and bone jail cell of fingers wrapped around the stone. Thor holds her steady while she bends over Vision, unfurling her fingers, her hair falling like a tattered curtain down to his chest. For a moment her pale hand with its dark, chipping polish is all Natasha can see of the exchange beyond her hair and Thor’s legs. She reaches out, the mind stone floating of its own accord from her palm, hovering and gliding with the same slow, eerie weightlessness as its host. It halts a few inches from Vision’s forehead. Thor’s free hand tightens around his hammer. Wanda’s hand bleeds a wisp of red, and James has to hold Natasha back as she guides the stone home and seals it with a flash. She mutters something that the broken comm she’s still wearing only barely picks up. Natasha imagines she hears Sokovian, something that translates more or less to “Don’t you _dare_ give me that,” though the verb _give_ is the only word in the whole of it that’s completely clear, and whether she’s whispering to the stone or to Vision isn’t clear.

Thor pulls her to her feet. She steadies herself with both hands, clinging to his sapling sized wrists. She looks miniscule standing beside him. And stand beside him she does, refusing to move any further than required by repeated pleas to at least step back. He keeps his hand out behind him, ready to grab her, or to hold her back, even as he raises Mjolnir towards a dusty sky and emerging stars.

Cloudless space-sky notwithstanding, the lightning comes.

Wanda reels, shielding her face. Whether it’s white-hot or cold Natasha can’t tell, though she can feel the hair standing up on her arm beneath a tear in her suit, the threads of which are also standing at attention. James pulls his lightning-rod left hand away. Overhead, a tree of lightning splinters the sky, splaying around still standing heroes in a massive, crackling dome arcing from ground and sky alike, poles conjoining in an upraised hammer. Thor slams it and its electric tails down to Vision’s chest. The lightning snaps, seizing into a single beam seeking ground through nonresponsive tissue and vibranium bones. _Either we just brought him back from the dead, or we roasted him,_ is the last clear thought Natasha forms before an expanding shockwave throws her—and all of her companions—backwards into the ground.

When she sits up, rubbing her spinning head, more than one person is griping at Thor, who’s lifting Wanda back to her feet. He offers her an arm to lean on, which she refuses to take. Natasha glances at James. His eyes repeat her worries back to her, _are you going to get her, am I going to get her, or is Clint going to get her, if that didn’t work?_ Natasha’s silent reply, spoken with a glance and pursed lips, is _If it didn’t we’ll probably have to leave her to Thor._ Him, or someone with a suit. The last time Wanda had lost someone she especially loved—they’d later pieced together—she’d vaporized a small army of Ultron bots with her eyes shut. Vision, who’d been tapped into the entire collective via an individual he’d been combating some ways off,  had the privilege of experiencing that moment, and had advised against recreating it; words Natasha will raise him herself just to make him eat if the performance repeats in his name.

Seconds pass, outstripping the length of time that subjecting him to Mjolnir took to elicit a response last time. The first time. Ten, twenty seconds. Wanda edges around Thor, who steps back, away, and drops to his knees. Mjolnir falls from his hand and tumbles to rest at his side.

Wanda’s settling is more delicate. Slow. As if she fears committing to the gesture of kneeling will also commit her to a particular, dreaded outcome. She inches first onto her knees, and then onto her side, hip buried in the dirt, thigh stacked on thigh perpendicular to how Vision lies. Natasha inches over, as near to silently as she can muster, to gain a vantage point from which she can see her face. The one she reaches is all but in James’s lap, though he doesn’t seem to mind.

In front of them, Wanda’s face is blank. The kind of saddened, perfect calm Natasha remembers from soaring Orthodox cathedrals, the expression of saints and angels, though neither of them had ever worn so much as a glimmer of red in their eyes. James sees that detail, too, drawing on his sniper’s sense of detail.

“What is she doing?” he mutters.

“Looking for thoughts,” Natasha whispers in reply.

The Avengers wait in breathless silence. Wanda’s eyes still sparking, she leans closer and closer to the ground without response. She comes to rest with her body settled from shoulder to ankle in the dust, her cheek pressed against Vision’s chest, her face turned away from the crowd.

Five more seconds.

When he comes to, he knocks her backwards.

He jolts into life with a vengeance and a gasp, sitting bolt upright, limbs stiffening beneath him. The whole motion is so sudden that he tosses Wanda away from his torso, throwing her sideways where she catches herself by his knee. It startles the rest of the crowd. Danvers, who isn’t one for screaming, shouts and jumps halfway into Rhodes’ lap, while someone else properly, theatrically, shrieks. James swears. Stark’s repulsors flare up, then quiet with a whine.

Vision stares at the woman clinging to his leg. He doesn’t recognize her.He looks at her the way Natasha has seen him stare at enemies. Cold and removed, an ant against a boot.

“Oh God.”

It takes her a moment to realize the voice behind those words is hers. But the scene in front of them is a pageant none of them can move fast enough now to touch and she sits, frozen, James clinging to her waist, and watches it play out. There’s nothing left but horror on Wanda’s red-eyed face. Her mouth hangs open, stretching her skin too tight over her cheekbones, frozen in silent aghast. Vision raises a hand.

Wanda lunges, plastering him across the face with her hand. A burst of aimless red leaks out from under her palm before the suddenness of the motion finishes knocking her off balance and she falls over at his side, forearms dug into the ground beneath her. Vision recoils. And freezes. And shakes his head with violent enthusiasm. There’s a pause. One terrible, held-breath moment, before he remembers how to talk.

“Every—time,” he chokes, the words spaced out and the sentence half formed. “Odd.”

Wanda looks up at him from the dirt. He’s half upright, legs out in front of him, arms supporting him, looking for all the world as if he’s no stronger than her despite his indestructible bones. So she sits up on her own accord, settling so that she’s seated on her heels with her legs folded beneath her. She says nothing, nor does Vision, whose chest—pseudo-breathing be damned—is heaving.

Some ways away, a Guardian claps a few times, only to be chastised with an insistent _I am Groot._ The Avengers remain silent, watching, some more stunned than others. T’challa, for one, though newer to their ranks, looks utterly unsurprised. Danvers, conversely, is squinting at the scene in front of her as if she’d been hoping she’d just . . . _missed something_ in the heat of battle only to find a much deeper conspiracy at work. Clint is still sprawled on the ground but has rolled over to better stare at both Vision and Wanda, as well as Natasha, who rolls her eyes at him. _Not now, Barton._

Vision speaks again with great effort. His sentence is riddled with spaces born of weakness and breathing. With eyes only for Wanda, Thor’s near proximity and the veritable prayer circle of Avengers surrounding him momentarily irrelevant, he asks a question in barely more than a whisper, his God and JARVIS given voice as husky—Natasha imagines—as it’s ever going to get.

“How is it,” he gasps, “that you are always the first person I see?”

Wanda’s saints and angels face splits, bursts into a broad smile with ragged edges.

“Probably because,” she answers, pausing over an unsuccessful attempt to wrangle her smile and fight her shivering lower lip, “I am the first to know you are here—I can see you thinking a mile off.”

Vision sits up a little straighter, rearranging his limbs. It gives him a better vantage point from which he watches Wanda’s wild eyes. She releases is a hysteric guffaw that bubbles in the middle and breaks at the end, whipping a look from Vision’s face that might have been on its way to a smile. There’s a glimmer in her eyes that isn’t red.

“It—” she adds, the word taking two tries, “it’s probably that . . . _stupid_ stone in your head—”

She’s still smiling, still playing it like a joke. But from behind her grin the tears erupt, all of them at once, so that the impact of the forced-laugh-turned-sob knocks her face forward into her hands, only her eyes and the dirt-streaked tops of her cheekbones visible above her fingertips. Beside her, Vision falters. He lifts a hand as if to console her, then lowers it. Then shifts all of his weight to take the last of it off of his hands—his posture a shadow of its usual stiffness that suggest that, if forced, he might even know how to slouch—so that he can reach up with both hands to pull Wanda’s away from her face. He manages to remove one hand only for it to be replaced by the other which insists on muffling her emotions by remaining firmly clasped across her mouth.

Recognizing a losing battle, he experiments with wiping tears from beneath her eye with one thumb instead, lowering his palm in miniscule increments to rest against her cheek. He says her name. She hiccups, the tears running dry already though the sobs aren’t prepared to stop. She, like the rest of them, is still too dehydrated, her body too exhausted, to withstand extensive bouts of crying.

Vision smiles with only the far corner of his mouth. Paired with the intensity in his eyes it looks almost like a scowl.

“I’m all right, Wanda.” he tells her. “Really. I’m exhausted, admittedly, but I am all right.”

Her reply to these words is the same as her response to the last. Frustrated, brow furrowed below the stone that’s giving him life, mouth not wholly closed, he takes her face in both hands at once. He’s knitting his plasticine brows so furiously the stone above them seems at risk of being pushed out by the sheer force of synthetic muscle. Wanda lifts her eyes to him with some encouragement from his palms, and drops her hand.

“I don’t understand,” be begins, only to stop, thunderstruck, as Wanda falls silent as death.

Her breathing, still crying-ragged, goes oddly quiet. Her mouth falls open. Her eyebrows race up her forehead. Natasha wishes for a moment she could pull out a camera to capture the moment, certain she will never see Vision so bewildered by anything _ever_ again as he is by Wanda’s incredulous expression in this moment. It’s an expression lost to history in an instant: The corners of her open mouth turn upwards, and she shakes her head once, twice in his hands, eyebrows coming together to form a seam down her forehead. Vision stares at her as if she’s lost her mind.

Wanda sighs, and kisses him.

The motion is quick, their faces having already been drawn close enough together by his intense scrutiny of her expression that all she has to do is lift her chin to bring her lips to his.

Vision takes the gesture well for someone who has, presumably, never been kissed in his life. He pulls his hands away from her face only for an instant, and when he returns them it’s with his eyes closed and his head inching towards his shoulder, searching for the next correct step with slow and considerate movements.

James mutters something that’s all but lost in Natasha’s hair. “Go get him, Wanda.”

The kiss, though, is a tame first attempt, all told, and over quickly. More quickly than Wanda seems to have in mind, if her lurch forward when he breaks away is any indication. Vision releases her face and sits back with inappropriate abruptness, mouth moving over unsatisfactory, unformable words.

“Wait,” he manages at last, and Wanda goes stock-still. All except for her eyes. Those narrow to slits, framing a stare that stops Vision’s sentence in its cluttered tracks.

“Vision,” she says, swallowing a residual shuddering breath so as to speak with dangerous calm, “I swear, if you kiss me like that, only so you can  offer me a ‘but I am an _android_ ’ speech, the next time I touch you will be to slap you out of your senses.”

Vision shuts his uncooperative mouth. After a moment of silence, he manages: “Fair enough.”

It’s then that Clint stands up, clearing his throat with all the obnoxious gusto he’s capable of as he goes, kicking up dust and wholly ruining the mood with every obvious intention of doing exactly that.

“All right,” he grunts, “I don’t know about you guys, but that’s my hint to give these two a minute . . . are you coming or not?”

He’s met with a chorus of throat-clearing and affirmation. Wanda smiles up at him, blood rushing into her cheeks. Sam offers her a thumbs-up as he gets up to leave, and she somehow manages to bite her lip _while_ smiling for a moment before becoming enraptured with a spot on the ground near Thor’s departing left foot. He walks away beaming. Avengers and Guardians alike filter out behind him.

The Guardians seem happy to leave not long thereafter, if grumbling about reports to Nova Corpse can count as happiness. The remaining Avengers give the couple— _not a couple_ , **_couple_** _, Stark_ —an hour before hunger and homesickness as much as boredom dictate that they return and test the waters. They arrive to find that Vision and Wanda have moved to the ship, seated side by side on the ramp, Vision’s hand on Wanda’s back, his eyes on the long tendrils of knotted hair she’s working free with her fingers as she talks to him. Vision struggles to his feet as they approach. Wanda follows suit, taking his outstretched hand. Neither of them are completely stable, but both are better than they were, a patchwork of bandages and splints on Wanda and a certain colorlessness to Vision notwithstanding.

“Did you crazy kids get that all . . . worked out?” Stark says. Wanda smiles.

“You could say that,” she says. She’s yet to drop Vision’s hand.

“Good, that’s . . . good—”

“I think Stark is saying he’s happy for you,” Natasha says. Several people laugh. Vision nods in Stark’s general direction.

“And that someone other than him should fly us home,” Rhodes adds. Stark sputters, and Rhodes shakes his head. “Come on, man. Use your words.”

Stark mutters something Natasha is happy to leave unheard. Thor steps forward.

“Vision,” he bellows, “You look as though you are feeling stronger, is that so?”

“I do indeed,” he replies.

“Excellent.” Thor claps his hands together, rubbing his palms back and forth and beaming. “In that case, perhaps you and Wanda would like to inform the rest of us what has transpired here. I take it you have news for us.”

Wanda rolls her eyes skyward, then glances sideways at Vision. He takes in her eyes for a moment and nods.

“We do,” he says, glancing at Wanda between words. “ . . . I do—”

He doesn’t finish, but rather trips off the end of the word, looking to Wanda again. In them there’s a whisper of red, on her lips a closed-mouthed, impish grin. Vision looks up at his audience. And _shrugs._ It’s a Vision shrug, an incline of his head followed by an incremental lifting of his shoulders, but it is a shrug.

“Actually,” he explains, turning his body towards Wanda as he goes, “ _this_ is really all there is to it.”

He pauses long enough to receive one collective squint from his audience, looks back to Wanda, releases her hand, and slides his left arm around her back. His right arm goes behind her head, and he pulls her up against his chest, lifting her onto her toes.

“Fast learner,” Natasha mutters, smiling and shaking her head as he lowers his mouth to hers with a vengeance. Wanda throws her arms around his neck. She drags herself backwards through the air and takes him with her, throwing an arch into her back that’s more O’Hara than Witch.

From Natasha’s left, Clint snorts. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

“For those two?” she retorts, “just be glad they’re too tired to do this and fly.” To her right, James laughs. Natasha joins him, chuckling to herself until she runs out of energy to do so. When she does she sighs, crosses her arms, and calls out in Sokovian:

“Hey girl, don’t you need to come up for air, or something?”

Wanda doesn’t have much to say in response. With her voice, she has nothing at all to offer. Her mouth is too preoccupied. With her posture, she has nothing grandiose. But Wanda has never told much. Her softer sides and protective nature, her determination and dangerous edges, have mostly become apparent to Natasha over the years in the form of moments and gestures, and that’s more or less how she coveys the precious little she has to say for herself now. There’s no kicking her foot in the air, no more blushing, no removing her hand from the back of his neck long enough to wave Natasha off. Her retort, instead, is the appearance of a dimple at the corner of her busy lips. A lifting of her cheek below a closed eye. A soft smile, pressed against Vision’s mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Notes:  
> I actually have a lot of these, all on world building semantics for those of you who care. I stuck them down here at the bottom so that those of you who don’t could ignore them. Still, I apologize in advance for the incoming text wall.
> 
> Firstly, just in case anyone is side-eyeing me for it, here’s my Sokovia rationale: We don’t have a lot of history for Sokovia, and I wanted Wanda to feel like she was coming from an actual place with a history and a culture. The alphabet we glimpse in the movie, I understand, is Serbian Cyrillic, but her place of origin in the comics is very clearly inspired by rural Romania or Hungary. (Or, at least, 1960’s Marvel’s conception of —probably drawn more from Dracula than reality—what that region is like.) So I decided to avoid the turmoil of trying to base it on any one specific country and leave what I could ambiguous, giving it a “””generic””” backstory as either a former Soviet Satellite state, or an independent one which had at one point or another been occupied by Soviet forces. I thought that seemed reasonable based on its Eastern European locale, and it gave me some common ground for Nat and Wanda to stand on including shared cuisine and language familiarity. Though the movie seemed intent on having all of Sokovia speak broken English as their first language, I choose to believe that’s bullshit and that Sokovian is an entirely individual but likely Slavic language. But that said, if it was ever a Soviet satellite, the odds of its having had Russian forced on it in some capacity or another—whether as a language of business or in some more aggressive form—are pretty high, and I assumed that if everyone in Sokovia knew English, they’d also most definitely all know Russian. So that’s what that’s about.
> 
> Secondly on the Russian itself and on Wanda’s English: I tried to keep the Russian to a minimum, in part because my Russian is horrific and in part because I don’t know that a lot of you want to deal with it. Where I did use it, though, I spelled it phonetically. Or what I think looks phonetic. If anyone was planning on chewing me out about my endings not agreeing, save yourself the trouble— I do know утро is neuter. As for Wanda, in the movie her grammar is all over. Sometimes she struggles with tense, sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she uses contractions, sometimes she doesn’t. So, I tried to keep some of her more common linguistic quirks in play, but chose flow over fake English-as-a-second-or-third-language grammar wherever the two clashed.
> 
> Thirdly, on the nicknames: since Natasha is already a diminutive, but everyone on the team insists on shortening it even further, I decided there was no reason that Wanda shouldn’t get a nickname for Nat of her own. And since we have no way of knowing the way Sokovian diminutives are constructed, I made something up based on the Russian endings I do know. As for “Natalia” from Bucky, I pulled that from some sequences in “Captain America and Hawkeye,” just because I thought Bucky should get his very own Natasha nickname, too.
> 
> Oh, and on characterization for future MCU characters: I’ve read the most recent (as of the time of writing this) Captain Marvel, and I’ve read Avengers 57-130 or so, and I’ve seen some cartoons. That’s my honest to goodness understanding of T’challa and Carol, then, and it’s not much. So where appropriate, I kept their dialogue a little minimalist rather than inventing them from scratch and frustrating those of you who do know them well. Which for all I know I’ve done anyway, so let it be known that I am VERY, VERY, VERY open to feedback on that front, and also eternally sorry.
> 
> And oh, ok, on characterization in general: I love comic books. And I especially love how Vision is rendered in the books. But at the end of the day I just kind of threw his MCU/616 characterization in a blender (because I love them both in verrrrryyyyy different ways) and then just pulled out what I liked. Which I hope worked. For the rest of the group, I relied mostly on what we see in the MCU with a few exceptions, primarily 1) Civil War, where I mixed and matched comic canon with how the retconned backstories of the MCU might influence their reg/anti-reg sentiments, 2) Clint and Bucky’s being less antagonistic, because Clint is just generally less antagonistic in the movies about everything than he is in classic Avengers, and 3) the spelling of JARVIS. In the comics I fell in love with it’s always been presented (that is, when we’re not talking Jarvis the butler) like an acronym or something, and so that’s the only way I can stand to write it, no matter what Tony’s dashboard sticker says. Also, everyone got comic powers. Because Wanda Badass Maximoff can too manipulate reality itself and no one is telling me otherwise.


End file.
